Archived Posts 2009 - Page 43 of 64 | Acton PowerBlog

“America has been cashing checks on the promise of future Social Security checks, and on the promise of an endlessly robust housing market,” writes Jonathan Witt in his commentary this week. “But somewhere along the way, too many of us stopped funding the checking account with its principal asset: young adults who work hard, pay into the Social Security system, and buy homes for the families they themselves intend to raise.”

No, conservative and Christian are not synonymous, but in the context of the cultural impact of Hollywood, there’s a lot of overlap. For Christians interested in engaging this field by pursuing both technical and moral excellence, there is an outstanding organization called Act One.

We need to build a New American Culture, and turn our backs on the culture of the state. We need to stop according respect or credence to reviews and awards that are used as social engineering tools to force the culture into anti-American state worship. We need to build an infra-structure of funding, review attention and awards to give praise, purpose and prestige to those artists who stand outside the MSM’s climate of opinion.

It would be wrong to say too much about what such a New American Culture would look like. Individualism is the very essence of both conservatism and art. But I think we can say that such a culture would reflect and uplift the values and perspectives that made the west and America the greatest and freest places on the globe; it would put forward an image of man as our founders knew him to be, flawed and sinful yet capable of striving toward dignity and salvation through self-reliance and sacrifice. It need not be—it should not be, in my view—squeaky clean or restrained by some new Hays Office production code of what the audience should be allowed to see. Sensationalism, sex and violence have been part of the arts since art began. Artists are entertainers, after all, not policy wonks.

In truth, there is only one essential principle our new culture needs to remember and embody and it’s this: liberty is better than slavery. This principle alone implies a moral order and a human purpose. It makes a small state better than a big one. It makes America better than, say, Saudi Arabia. It makes a religion based on “love thy neighbor,” better than one based on submission. This principle alone will guide us away from mealy-mouthed self-abasement to balanced self-criticism and praise amidst our search for the dignity, strength and morality befitting free men and women.

It is true that liberal depictions of dissolute and immoral behavior are rampant in modern cinema and justified as the desired end of hedonistic tendencies, but conservative critics too often come across as cultural scolds, vilifying films and filmmakers for not portraying reality as conservatives would like to see it. For many conservative critics, the only worthwhile contemporary movies made are adaptations of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series or those that feature Kirk Cameron in a starring role. The verisimilitude inherent in all compelling storytelling is neglected in favor of presenting idealized worlds in which a clearly defined good always overcomes easily identified evil.

Such an approach is simplistic and insults those of us that can recognize the presence of moral themes in the works of Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor and Tom Wolfe, and don’t automatically blanch at cursing, violence, sex and nudity when it serves a real dramatic purpose. Humanity, of course, is fallen and it’s foolish to expect conservative audiences to respond only to films that depict all marriages as salvageable, all protagonists as heroic metaphors for Christ and all heroines as virgins until the wedding night. Reality teaches us that these scenarios are the exceptions rather than the rule.

Felix culpa – the fortunate fall from whence one can experience God’s grace – is the phrase St. Thomas Aquinas used to explain how God allows evil to exist in order to allow for the greater good of His redemption. For all the decadence he depicted, for example, French poet Charles Baudelaire was perceived by none other than T.S. Eliot as still entering the Church albeit through the back door. (more…)

One of the more interesting discussions at last week’s Heritage Foundation Resource Bank meeting in Los Angeles was the “Hollywood Conversations” session with screenwriter and novelist Andrew Klavan and Lionel Chetwynd, a writer, producer and director. Both men pleaded with the gathering of conservatives — social, political, economic — to stop beating up on Hollywood ad nauseam and to do more to support good work by conservatives.

Here’s the gist of the argument from a recent Klavan interview on Big Hollywood:

We have to just take it as given that the mainstream venues are against us, the awards won’t go to us, the reviewers will attack us — sometimes without even admitting why. We have to speak up for ourselves, we have to review each other, honestly and fairly, we have to buy the books that stand up for what’s right-assuming they’re good, assuming they do what they’re supposed to do, entertain, tell good stories. We have to understand that the media is our enemy — the enemy of the American idea, our founders’ ideas — and we have to make our own arts, and celebrate our arts and reward our arts. And then we’ll see who wins in the marketplace.

Both Klavan and Chetwynd said that there are far more conservatives in Hollywood than most people imagine. Yet the conservative think tank, cultural and political culture does little to recognize and encourage them. Compared to the cultural left, conservatives in entertainment have few award ceremonies, prizes, and regular reviewers who support good projects. As an example, they cited the recent HBO film “Taking Chance” as one work that deserved far more attention on the right than it got. The story, about a military escort officer accompanying home the body of a Marine corporal killed in Iraq, drew 2 million viewers and became the most-watched original movie to debut on the network in five years.

A scene from HBO's 'Taking Chance'

Andrew Breitbart, the founder of Big Hollywood, told the Resource Bank blogger session that Hollywood conservatives practice a “big tent” inclusiveness with none of the internecine feuds so common in Washington. He predicted that more conservatives would “come out of the closet” in Hollywood (he has 200 bloggers on his site) but that they could use a lot more support from the wider conservative movement.

Saturday is World Malaria Day, which each year draws attention to the scourge that malaria is to millions of people throughout the developing world. An estimated 1-3 million people die of malaria each year, and many of these are children. But even when people don’t die, malaria is debilitating. Malaria reduces the red blood cell count to low levels, which in addition to all of the other symptoms, drains energy and saps creativity. In response to this, the thing large multinational aid organizations have focused on are bed nets. Now bed nets can be helpful, but they are a short-term fix. Fortunately, after years of false ideology preventing the use of DDT, the world is starting to come back to its senses. Acton has been promoting this for several years.

Today, NRO’s The Corner quoted malaria expert Richard Tren, who argues that a bed net is a potentially useful but overemphasized tool in the war against malaria, with DDT and, surprisingly to some, economic freedom having greater promise for pushing back the scourge of malaria over the long run.

And if bed nets or any other foreign interventions are to do significant and lasting good, charitable enterprises will need to rediscover the importance of subsidiarity, of humans on the ground in relationship with other human beings, as opposed to government-to-government aid transfers that often do more harm than good.

One person who speaks forcefully to this issue is Rwandan Anglican Bishop John Rucyahana, a leading force in the reconciliation in Rwanda and a key partner in Bridge2Rwanda and the P.E.A.C.E Plan. In an interview we conducted with Bishop John near his orphanage in Rwanda last fall, he commented on why U.N. bed net programs often fail, and why the P.E.A.C.E. plan is succeeding:

We have a percentage of people, thank God, the number is getting less, but we have a great percentage of people who don’t read and write. And you give them a mosquito net; you scare them to death. You need to tell them that the mosquito net would prevent mosquitoes from biting them, and they need to trust you’re not telling them a lie. You’re not trapping them with that mosquito net. They’ve been deceived for too long. They need to have people who trust them, and they trust. And the people who love them; and the people they love. So Rick Warren has it deadly right to say that the church is needed to be employed into the economy, into the health and the social recovery of nations.

Churches have the life-giving hope of the Gospel, Bishop John explains, and they are embedded locally.

The church is out there with the people. You know I’m hugging and I’m shaking hands with every one of these children because I’m with them all the time. They know who I am, and they know I am there for them. During the aftermath of the genocide, many people ran away from here, and I stayed with them. All of these individuals giving the aid ran away from here. And I stayed. Churches are here. And we know how to approach them.

It is our pleasure to welcome guest ramblings on the PowerBlog, and we are happy to feature this contribution from Catherine Claire Larson, author of As We Forgive, the subject of this week’s PBR question.

I wasn’t able to include it all in my book, but I’ve been greatly impressed by the groups which are wedding reconciliation work with micro-enterprise. World Relief has an essential oil business that is enabling Hutu and Tutsi to work in reconciled community, Indego has their basket weaving enterprise that is doing the same, and Prison Fellowship Rwanda has been involved with a cattle operation, while Land of a Thousand Hills works with coffee plantations. It strikes me that by creating economic opportunities where interdependence is vital, they are really creating ideal environments for reconciliation and restoration. I wasn’t ever able to track it down, but one of my friends shared that her college professor did his dissertation in Reconstruction era history of America. He concluded that in areas where interdependence was more vital to survival that racial reconciliation happened at a more rapid pace. Intuitively, that seems to make sense. I’d love to see the research though.

Additionally, for a very good read on how social conditions contribute to reconciliation, take a look at the book Amish Grace. It documents the Nickel Mine school shooting, along with several other acts of violence that have happened in the Amish community. What’s interesting is how that society’s normal emphasis on forgiveness creates conditions where radical grace seems to happen almost naturally. It’s an interesting case study, although obviously far removed from most social situations. But I still think there are take away lessons.